I didn't believe it

Was happening

Even as I lay in the hospital bed

Unable to move

Anything below my waist

It was like a bad dream

The kind that no matter

How hard you try

You just can't wake up from.

They said I was one

Of the lucky one's

Fifty students dead

From the senior class

Only a hundred and fifty

In the class

Now a hundred and fifty families

Are grieving for there dead.

(1)

The cops come by

With a million questions

Asking over and over again

What I remember.

I remember thinking

My best friend Julie

Was lucky to stay home

She had surgery

On her right knee

Days before,

A soccer injury

I think they said

After that

My world goes back

And I don't wake up

Until I am laying

In a hospital bed

At Lincoln Memorial.

When I wake up days later

I can't help but thinking

God works in mysterious ways

If Julie hadn't had knee surgery

She would have been

At school that day

And maybe the

Count would have been fifty

One

Instead of fifty

And I might have had

To go to my best friends fueneral.

(2)

Mom comes in every morning

Wearing a smile

But it isn't the same raidiant smile

From before

It's more weathered now.

It seems to take more energy

For her to smile

When before it came so easily,

And I know she must be thinking

She could have been one of the fifty parents

Burying their children.

(3)

Julie came by to see me today

It's been a week since

The girl and her boyfriend

Walk into Lincoln High

Shooting Seniors

I wonder why

Only seniors and how

They knew the difference.

But I don't say

Anything

Not then anyway.

I am just glad

My best friend

Is a live

That I am a live.

Loosing my life

I know would have

Been worse

Than loosing my ability to walk

I have a lot more living to do

I must,

Because the girl next to me

Was shot dead.

Shirley

Was her name

We'd been going to school together

All our school lives really

And in a town like this

That's not all that uncommon.

(4)

I know I am one

Of the "lucky one's"

I survived the bullets

Survived being shot,

Others didn't fare as well

As I did.

I begin to vaguely remember

The smell of gun powder

And the site of blood

Classrooms had become morgues

Carrying so many dead bodies

While teachers frantically run around

Trying to help those still a live.

I find it strange to think of

Fifty of my classmates

As dead bodies.

(5)